Who Gets to Own Rock & Roll History?
Les Paul's house in Mahwah was more than a place to sleep. It was the workshop where he stacked recordings on top of recordings and basically handed rock and roll its toolbox. Watching the bulldozers take that down feels like losing the physical proof that one curious man in a suburban home changed everything. The family's devastation makes sense; that building was a time capsule with a control room.
I keep thinking about how we treat these sites. Landmarks get plaques when they're convenient, and get leveled when they're in the way. A guitar-shaped monument in a museum is nice, but it doesn't carry the same charge as standing in the room where the tape machines ran. Something gets lost when the actual geography of invention disappears.
That said, the music itself is stubborn. The recordings survive, the techniques survive, and every guitarist who plays a solid-body is carrying a piece of that house forward. I'd want to know if anyone tried to save it, and what it would have taken. Maybe the honest answer is that history lives in the records, not the drywall.